The Mire: Tangents, threads and opinions from The Wire
HQ

13|05|2010

Sound artist Susan Philipsz has been nominated for the Turner Prize this year (along with The Otolith Group,
one half of which is The Wire contributor Kodwo Eshun). It
reminded me that we shot some footage of an installation of hers at
the ICA back in 2008.

The Internationale was shown for two days at the
ICA in central
London off The Mall, a wide boulevard leading from Trafalgar Square
up to Buckingham Palace (monarchs use The Mall to impress during
state visits and other ceremonies). To experience the piece, a
small group of visitors were led to the rear of the ICA and up a
ladder onto the bare roof terrace. A single loudspeaker attached to
the façade of the grand building broadcast Philipsz’s voice softly
warbling its way through the anthem of international socialism, blending with
the background drone of city traffic. Philipsz’s work takes the
form of a series of cover versions; studies in how particular songs
can mutate, displacing them from their own time, projecting them
via a different voice (usually her own), and mixing them into
different spaces (usually public, transient ones). Filter,
one of her better known works, has the artist singing pop songs by
Radiohead, The Velvet Underground, The Vaselines and The Rolling
Stones through the public address system at a supermarket in East
London. An earlier version took place in Belfast’s main bus
station, both installations eliciting a wide range of responses,
from interested to irritated (as covered in Cross
Platform, The Wire 244)

Philipsz has presented several versions of The
Internationale. The first was in a pedestrian underpass in
Ljubljana, Slovenia in 1999. Another took place in 2000 at Berlin’s
Friedrichstraße Station, a notorious border crossing between East
and West Germany during the Cold War. Both of those installations,
situated in the former Eastern Bloc, would seem to turn the song
into an elegy for a time when international socialism was a
reality. It’s less certain what’s happening in this London version
though. Situated in the heart of the old British Empire and current
capital of finance, the displaced Internationale has
either lost an authoritative voice or is just being drowned out by
the city’s noise.

The Internationale was made as part of
Out Of Bounds, a short series of artists
interventions in the private spaces of arts institutions around
central London.